Rock the Boat: Law, Society, and Social Justice

NIH Spends Our Money to Torture Animals for No Good Reason

Tens of millions of animals are prisoners in research labs where scientists conduct experiments on them. Some experiments are lethal; the subjects of others live to see another day — and another experiment. Much of this research is not only cruel, it is useless and even silly.

The federal National Institutes of Health likely spends well over a billion dollars on vivisection every year. It is supposed to fund research that will help extend healthy life and reduce the burdens of illness and disability (for humans). But a significant portion of its grant money goes towards research that doesn’t serve NIH’s mission at all.

Many people resign themselves to or even champion animal research as an indispensable tool for saving human lives, but alternatives exist, and there would be more of them if the federal administration did what Congress told it to do.

NIH has turned its back on a Congressional mandate that it reduce the number of animals labs use and fund the development of experimental methods that don’t involve animals. Instead it continues to fund the confinement, torture, and killing of animals for no good reason, uses taxpayer dollars to do it, and ignores its own mission.